Systemd and Fedora 14

Hey, it's cool, but until the bug stream doesn't slow down, there's no chance that you can include it in a distribution. Not even in one as crappy as Fedora. We've suffered this style ever since RH 9's (IIRC) backport of NPTL.

> Dragging this out "so it gets more testing before making it for real" just won't get more testing overall, at most roughly the same amount but more drawn out in time.
That argument is already barely sustainable for upstream kernels, and it's nonsense for a distribution.

Yes, at some point there won't be new bugs reported. Then it means you can end the beta-test phase, set up more stress-testing, get more packages to work with it, ship it, and fix the tons of bugs reports.
Of course, I mean that first systemd should have a alpha-beta-stable set of releases, and then a distribution should test integration (over more than 6 months). Which means that Lennart's thinking in this mail [1] is broken.
I mean, yes, it's optional in the current Fedora, but it's not yet ready. Finish it, declare it bug-free, ship it as optional, and then watch testers report tons of bugs - because those testers are simply more masochistic machos with crazy configurations that you have to support.

> And that is bad for developer morale (and focus), and probably damages the whole effort.

Hey, that's crap. If developers can't wait six months to replace the core component of a system, they should be fired. Now. Because they wouldn't be able to deal with much harder problems. I guess it does not matter, because it's just your idea.
I'm more concerned about concerns expressed in the article, like "Poettering has something of a reputation for waving away bugs as features" or the handling of noauto - I see the technical point in changing its handling, but I very much see that 99% of the users using noauto use it for good reasons which can go beyond boot-up time, and do so consciously, so changing the interpretation of noauto really questions the sanity of the developer. (Readers of The Art of Unix Programming from Raymond will also notice that choosing for users is very much against the Unix spirit in general, for the reasons I just discussed).

Finally, reading one of the original Nottingham's comments linked from the article [2] is enlightening. He's teaching release management to Poettering. Which means that I don't trust him to care for a distribution. Sure, he's a great and brilliant developer, able to think different, but those guys are not good for ensuring stability.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/401901/
[2] http://lwn.net/Articles/401921/